When congressional staffers combed through the report, one project in particular caught their attention: a small research study for something called the FutureMAP, which looked at the potential of using the “wisdom of crowds,” represented by free-market investors, to predict future political events. FutureMAP actually had its origins with a researcher from the National Science Foundation, who was interested in the predictive capabilities of open markets. DARPA had awarded contracts for very preliminary work, which would fund researchers to test whether having people wager real money on future
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